The Tao of Lithography – Part 1

Lithographic Stone

For those of you who are curious about some of the printmaking  techniques I’ve been focusing on, and for those who have asked me fore more detail, I’m writing up a mini series on the basics of what lithography is. If you have time to read through, you’ll find a greater appreciation for hand-pulled lithographs when you run into them at museums, galleries, andshows (I hope).

 

The Tao of Lithography – Part 1

Before inkjet printers and offset lithographic machines–there was hand lithography. A process-oriented, elegant form of visual reproduction with boundless fine art possibilities. It was used extensively to reproduce imagery and writings for over a century.

But it hasn’t just gone the way of the dinosaur as new printing techniques developed. Once relied upon as the a daily workhorse for visual production, it is now elevated to new states, new purposes.

Before AND after inkjet and laser printers, copy machines and offset commercial lithography shops, there was the original form of lithography. The ancestor of all digital printing.  The mighty, (yet humble), sometimes frustrating, always triumphant, lithograph. It existed before the evolution of desktop printing, but it’s no prisoner of ancient history. It doesn’t simply reside BEFORE fancy computer printers. It exists before and concurrently, occupying two points in time as if, by the sheer force of its presence, it can bend space and time at its own will.

For those who’ve tried it, or who work extensively in it, the sheer gravitational force encountered while creating, etching, and printing an image can sure seem like a story worthy of narration by Morgan Freeman. A “Through the Wormhole” experience, indeed. The magic of chemical transformation that takes place on a stone or plate surface is so subtle as to be almost invisible and unbelievable, yet completely effective.

Lithography is a process-oriented, almost miraculous form of printmaking which allows abundant dissemination of printed images and text. History (perhaps printmaking legend?) says Senefelder discovered the technique by accident, having written a laundry list on a random, finely grained piece of Bavarian limestone that happened to be sitting in his study. He wrote on the stone in grease, spilled an acid on top, and developed the phenomenal planographic printmaking technique we call “lithography.”

Whether the original tale is fanciful or not, lithography definitely feels like a supernatural marriage of physics and accident.

The process requires painstaking attention to detail, a meditative sense of repetition (some say monotonous) and basic properties surrounding oil and water: the fact that oil and water tend to repulse one another.

Artists draw on stones or plates (or use various other image making techniques on said stones and plates). The drawing mediums are greasy, creating an image constructed of oily material.

Here is detail of a stone I’ve recently worked on. I used my familiar Chinese brush painting techniques with water soluable tusche wash. The painting is done directly on the stone, which has a wonderful, fine-grain surface.

Tusche Wash Details

 

Working directly a stone is both fascinating and fun. I love the look and feel of a recently grained surface (stones must be literally “grained,” or sanded down before using each time). The photo below shows the stone that I painted on above, after being grained and re-surfaced for doing another image.

The object on the left hand side is called a “levigator,” which is a heavy object that uses centrifugal force to grind away the thin, top layer of stone as you control it by hand. The process of graining can sometimes take hours, using progressively finer carborundum grits to get just the right surface. I find the process to be meditative. You can get lost in the harmonious ringing sound of the levigator as it moves in circles across the limestone surface.

There is also plate lithography, which uses ball grained aluminum plates as matrices, instead of stone. I’ll talk about plates in one of my future chapters.

As you can imagine, preparing a stone and creating artwork on it is both rewarding and time-intensive.

The stone waiting to be etched

 

(Part 2 Coming soon!)

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